Global Warming

Baroness Young of Old Scone Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interests with a range of environmental organisations, as listed in the register. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for securing this important debate. I am very glad that he has seen the light on the road to Damascus and is now seeing climate change and biodiversity as a joined-up issue. Predictably, the noble Lord has done a splendid job of laying out the issues, so I will not duplicate that. I will simply say that looking after nature benefits not only nature but people, the climate and the economy; indeed, it is one of the most effective ways of reducing carbon and providing solutions to enable us to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

When I was looking at what I was going to say during this debate, I was very worried because, when talking about climate and biodiversity decline, you can begin to sound like Private Frazer from “Dad’s Army”—“We’re doomed!”—so I am going to talk about something much more positive: four real opportunities that are around right now, in the real world, that could make a difference for both climate and nature.

First, we will be building a lot in the next decade in pursuit of growth, housing, infrastructure and green energy. We have the opportunity to do all that in a completely different way—with planning decisions that are simultaneously good for the climate, the environment, the economy and people; using new green construction technologies; and building our new housing stock to the highest environmental and resilience standards.

We will have to change our current ways of doing things, of course, where too many developments threaten or destroy some of the most precious habitats for the storage of carbon and the support of biodiversity—vital carbon sinks such as, as the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, ancient woodlands, ancient and veteran trees, and peatlands, which store twice as much carbon as forests. You have no idea how difficult it was as a former chair of the Woodland Trust to put pen to paper to admit that something is better at storing carbon than trees are. What we must not do is what I call “doing an HS2”—driving in thoughtless straight lines across protected sites, important biodiversity and stuff that is really important for climate change.

My second proposition is that agriculture has probably the single biggest adverse impact on biodiversity and the climate change mitigation and adaptation that biodiversity can offer. But all is not lost; we have a significant amount of funding in this country already invested in agricultural support, which, if used skilfully, can simultaneously support biodiversity, climate change mitigation, food resilience and farmers. We have farmers who have shown that they understand the need for diverse and resilient farm businesses. So let us go for it, but with the climate change and biodiversity issues well embedded in all aspects of the agricultural landscape.

My third opportunity—I am sure the Minister will comment on this—is that right now we have an awful lot of initiatives across biodiversity and other environmental measures, planning and construction, energy systems and climate change, and very few of them are joined up. The Government set off in the right direction with joined-up mission boards in support of the manifesto, but we need to go further than that. We are blessed with one thing that joins up much of this: land. Land is a scarce resource. It is fundamental for a whole range of issues: climate impacts, biodiversity, housing, infrastructure development, energy, health, water quantity and quality, and growth.

So I urge the Minister not to keep us waiting any longer for the much-delayed—although I must admit it was the Tories who mostly delayed it—land use framework consultation, because that is the foundation that will join up many policies that currently are not joined up. But it also offers a process, nationally and locally, to get away from the sorts of conflicts in the past that were framed around the idea that we can either build or have biodiversity, but we cannot have both. I believe that we can have both and that local people have a right to expect both and to be part of that.

My fourth and last opportunity is that the majority of the biggest landowners in this country are public bodies. Look at the league table of land ownership in this country: I bet not many people know exactly who lies where in it. But if those public bodies, such as the Forestry Commission, the Crown Estate, the Ministry of Defence and others, were all to do the right thing by their use and management of their land in the interests of biodiversity and climate change, we could make tremendous progress and set some terrific examples of good practice for private landowners, and globally.

Let me take those three examples in a bit more detail: the Crown Estate, the defence estate and the Forestry Commission. I praise the Crown Estate for the progress it has voluntarily made in addressing environmental responsibilities and welcome the fact that, as a result of the Crown Estate Act, it will have an even stronger statutory requirement to do so. The defence estate is less promising, with land set aside for carbon sequestration through tree planting and habitat creation now being sold off for development as it searches for cash. The Forestry Commission, the biggest landowner in Britain, needs serious review. Its establishing statute is now over 60 years old and shows signs of age.

The statutory purpose of the Forestry Commission is to promote the interests of forestry and the production and supply of timber. Conservation is to be undertaken, but only if it can be balanced with timber production. We need an urgent review of the legislative framework of the Forestry Commission to bring it into the 21st century and, indeed, we might well consider tasking all public bodies that have major land holdings to deliver statutory targets for biodiversity, environment and climate in much the way that has now been done for the Crown Estate. I hope the Minister will grasp these opportunities.